Wedge

OK, so let's now take a look at the Admin Panel. This is quite a big and scary thing. And I'm going to cover it in detail because I think it's particularly interesting.

First up we have the slightly intimidating front page. Yes, the licence key is missing from this test install. I will fix that momentarily but I wanted you to see it!

Notice also the '2 Items Requiring Attention' panel in the middle, that's certainly interesting to see. Other than that we have a nice shiny graph, a list of failed logins, latest from IPB and the admin notes, which is always useful.

There is one thing I want to add at this point before I get any deeper in: unlike SMF/Wedge, the admin panel is essentially a separate area to the core. It's in the /admin/ directory and you can rename it - you are even encouraged to do - and more importantly it is a separate login session from the main. This doesn't sound important, but it is as we shall see later on.

So ignoring that honking great warning, the first thing to notice is that we have a blue/purple colour scheme going on. This is... interesting. Even now, over 6 months on, I'm not sure I like it. But I don't actively hate it, so that's something.

There are some interesting quirks attached to the admin panel.

Firstly: admins cannot change their email address or password from inside the forum like normal - they *have* to do it inside the ACP. I actually didn't touch on the profile stuff in my last post, nuts.[1]

Secondly, like in MyBB you can add new items to the admin panel, literally adding new settings. Unlike MyBB, you can also drag and drop them around to rearrange them. Moving them also AJAXively saves the new position as you do it, which is cool.

Thirdly, you can actually bookmark pages of the admin page that you actually want to use.

Like MyBB and vBulletin, the vast bulk of settings is found in a list, literally a page full of 'groups of settings', like Email Set-Up, General Configuration, etc. as opposed to what we have which is grouping functionality and options together.

Again, the list of settings is absolutely thorough. There are at least a hundred options configurable from that area - interestingly, there are some ad-orientated features, simple but effective - you can add header HTML, footer HTML, override the standard header/footer in the board index, message index and topic view as well as adding code to show up after the first topic/post in the list.

Other fun things: there's an option to add Google Analytics code directly, as well as ping services on creation of new topics (like WP does)

There's also options for setting page title/meta description and meta keywords directly on the board index (but not anywhere else!!!)

Interestingly, the 'system' tab actually seems a bit disorganised to me. There are some other options available, like security tools (checking for certain functions being enabled, checking for unauthorised/suspicious files, checking for executable files, and the suggestion to enable open_basedir and rename the admin folder)

One thing I thought I'd just pick up on, though, because it's quite important is the anti-spam functionality, as it's quite important. Q&A is built in, there is a choice of using either reCAPTCHA or KeyCaptcha, IPS' own or none of the above. Of course you'll need the proper API keys.

If you're using a public install and put your licence key in, you'll also get included on IPS' API with Stop Forum Spam without having to get an API key of your own. This is interesting because it allows for a series of actions to be carried out based on the result from the API, be it allow registration/flag for admin review/allow but ban account/disallow registration.

There is also interestingly an option for flagging a member as spam which will auto post/PM ban, unapprove 3 days worth of posts and so on, and there's an option to enforce guests who post have to enter a separate code (like a CAPTCHA of sorts)... again, the impression is thorough but nothing new. The choice to include reCAPTCHA and KeyCaptcha in the core is also very interesting, but remember that IPS is lead primarily by its customers dictating what they want to see.

Other things in the core by default: FB Connect, Twitter Connect, Windows Live account connection and stuff like that... there's even VigLink integration (just supply your API key and go)

There is also the broader Log In Authentication Manager, which is interesting in itself. Remember I said that the admin was technically separate to the front end? This is why. You can declare different methods to use for authenticating users and drag 'n' drop them to indicate priority. And you can turn them on and off - but here's the clever part: you can actually disable internal authentication. You can actually disable conventional logins to the forum entirely, and defer it to LDAP, some kind of external database[2], converters from other systems or even IPS Connect. And the main admin login will be untouched.

IPS Connect is the big deal here - the idea is that you can use it to form a master/slave setup. Have two forums and want a bridge? No problem: set up one as master, set up the other as slave, turn off internal auth, turn on IPS Connect in slave mode and point it at the master... and BOOM. Instant forum network (since it will go get details of accounts from the master to the slave when you log into the slave). It's actually really slick. I want to get that functionality - perhaps even using the IP.Connect API (since that's open)

...and this is just the System tab.

It is worth noting that the ACP search is more powerful than others we've seen, because it's 'live'. Hang on, let me get you a screenshot. You can type, it'll give you answers and break them down into sections for you. And if you do hit the button, you'll end up on the results page with just the options selected (e.g. just options with 'mail' in the name) and not the full gamut of options. It's an interesting twist, but I'm personally not sure I like it. Some options only really make sense in context.

So anyway... System covers general stuff, the other options are: Forums (board management), Members, Look & Feel, Support, Stats & Logs, Other Apps

Surprisingly, Forums is actually quite a modest category; you set up the categories and boards, drag and drop rearranging (inside a category only and only at the same depth, children have to be handled manually), that sort of deal. There's a few other things... a category is just a different type of board. There's no posts allowed, it's not a destination for moving and it's presented differently but otherwise it's a board.

Board options... some quirky ones, you can indicate boards as being Q&A type boards where the topic starter and/or moderators can indicate the best answer in the topic[3], as well as having share links and stuff. You can also hide the last post from the board index, as a direct option, plus giving the option to show users the board and the list of topics but not actually to see the topics themselves.[4]

Boards can also be password locked or password-locked-except-to-certain-groups.

More interestingly, board creation is actually a 3 step process; step 1 sets up the above options plus the board's name, step 2 sets up whether HTML posting or bbcode is allowed, whether polls are allowed, bumping polls, topic ratings, post counts, minimum post count (to see/post), posters to see other members' topics[5]

After that we get to permissions. This is interesting and it serves as an interesting way to handle permissions. Here's a screenshot.

The way IPB handles permissions, essentially, is to separate groups from permissions, at least directly. You have several core groups: Administrators, Banned, Guests, Members, Moderators (global moderators), Validating (those pending account activation via email)... this makes things interesting, because you can allow people who have signed up to do some things and then let them do more by promoting their account once they've accepted the email.

Anyway, you create 'permission sets' which cover the types of things you want to do then attach them to one or more groups. So the Guests group has the Guest Forum Set which is the standard list of permissions a guest will get. You can set a given permission for all sets by default (e.g. show forum) or give a given set all the relevant permissions - note that as far as board permissions go, the main permissions are only for access to the forum, seeing topics, posting topics, posting replies and attachments. True per-board permissions can be done in the Members tab and we'll get there soon enough.

Still in Forums, there is the option for "Topic Multi-Moderation", which is a simple rules-based setup to make shortcuts to things for topics. The example in the manual is that you can create a multi-mod which: Prefixes [SOLD] on the title, puts a reply from the moderator with the content "This item has been sold, please contact the seller or buyer privately", locks the topic and moves it to an archive board. It's slick, can't argue with that. I'm not sure how much use it'd get though. Probably depends on the forum.

There's also the ability to manage the types of attachments allowed in the forum, the MIME type to send with it when downloading and so on (plus there are cute icons to be configured for each attachment type). Again, the impression is thoroughness but nothing particularly outstanding (SimpleDesk did much of this without the configurationy aspect)

Then we have RSS import. Firstly, the notion that you can import RSS feeds from a given URL and make them just work as forum posts - as a core feature. Fairly sure vB did this too but it still intrigues me to see it because of the logistical issues in terms of things like copied content.

More intriguingly, we have RSS export. It's not anything earth shattering, but you can't seem to generate feeds of just any old board. Some stuff like pages and the calendar generate feeds, but boards do not. Instead, you create feeds, and they get added to the RSS icon menu at the bottom of the page, and in those feeds you can dictate which board/boards are included, so you could create a feed of just announcements from one or two boards, then a general feed which excluded off topic stuff, then a feed which included everything and let uses see what they want out of that.

There's also an automatic archival system. This allows you to move topics from the main post table into an archive table (which can even be in a different database) - so only the newest stuff remains in the main post table. Archiving a topic means it becomes read-only, but with a performance benefit that it's intentionally not in the main tables. You can set it up based on lock/pinned status, whether it has a poll, min/max posts/views, based on which board(s) it's in and all kinds of other fun stuff. I'm just not sure it's as big a deal as they're intimating.

So Member Management... well, post counts are not explicit groups, they are titles from post count and assign 'pips', e.g. 0 posts = 1 pip, 10 posts = 2 pips, etc. and it's one image for all the pips, btw.

Then we have reputation - pretty much as other systems - then stuff like finding IP addresses a member has posted with and so on, plus registration-from-admin-panel and banning (which is similar to what Wedge does). Nothing particularly new here and variations of what SMF and Wedge already have.

You can also set defaults for notifications - for notifying users of reports, new comments, quotes (and not already following), likes, replies to followed topics, and so on and so on, you can indicate how it should arrive (email, inline notification, mobile notification), whether one or more options are disabled (e.g. you wouldn't use inline notification for weekly digests of followed topics) and whether members have the choice. Mobile notification if you're wondering is primarily for the IPS app - yes, IPS has an app for all IPB forums, and when you add your licence key you can generate push notifications to mobile.

Group management is much what you'd expect and it is in the groups -> permissions area that we set up per board permissions. You configure the given set and can pull up Forum/Calendar/Content/Downloads/Gallery permissions with columns of permissions like we saw earlier, with the boards/albums/whatever down the side.

Interestingly, the options provided seem at first glance inferior to SMF/Wedge but it's not entirely clear that it is (or not)... it's sort of a vibe of 'only what we need', you know?

Then there's custom profile fields - and they have much as we have, AIM/MSN/etc are all custom fields, preinstalled (unlike us) and their options are a bit different but similar (offering up dropdown select is a textbox where you add one line per option, in a key=value fashion)... it's certainly workable but actually less polished than other things.

Then we come to warnings - fairly standard stuff, creating templates of warnings that issue points, then doing things when a user accrues too many points. After that is 'Bulk Mail' or what we'd call newsletter. About as standard, too.

Lastly, Admin Restrictions. Whereas in SMF/Wedge, someone in the admin group has access to the admin as a whole, and then there are permissions that subdivide down and otherwise grant partial access without being an admin... IPB doesn't do that as such. You can make someone an administrator and put them in the administrators group - and then they only get the permissions you give them. Which seems a bit weird to me. An administrator that has absolutely no admin powers seems daft to me.

Note that there is a conspicuous lack of options for things like avatars; the choice is 'allow users to use Gravatars', they have the power to upload and use a Gravatar - there's no avatar gallery at all, and there's no apparent permission to select either.

Anyway. On to Look & Feel. IPB does the whole Skin thing. It has two skins in the base - the main and the mobile one. Skins have some basic options - who can access it (yes, some skins can be limited), and indicate what the images directory for it should be. From inside a skin you can manage any of its templates - they're all in the database - or its CSS. And you can also force a given skin to show to different user agents which is how it knows to select the mobile theme for mobile users - it's all customisable. Why you'd *want* to is another matter.

From the skin area you can also set the page URI and its meta tags, e.g. setting meta tags for /members/ to specify them for the memberlist, and you can indicate any meta tag you like, 'description', 'keywords', 'robots' and so on.

Also under Look & Feel you can customise the smileys and bbcode in use, it's about as functional as MyBB's - you indicate what the bbcode is by name, description, example (for the help page), alternative variants of the code, whether it's just a single tag or a regular pair of tags. It's also still limited in terms of options - you can only indicate one parameter through this interface, e.g. [tag=option]content[/tag], though there are some other interesting options - you can indicate a PHP file to run to get the content, and you can also limit use of bbc by board and by usergroup. This strikes me as potentially quite slow. :/

There's also a media handler, they do auto-embedding like Aeva does, but their setup is much simpler essentially being a regex find/replace on a post. There's only support out of the box for YouTube, Google Video, MySpace Video, GameTrailers, YouTu.be (yup, separate option entirely!), Flickr Images, and Vimeo with what appears to be semi-generic MP3 and Flash support, not sure about how that works. As in most places, there is an XML import/export function for easily sharing options with other people (or as a backup)

Censored word is much as expected, again with XML import, though you get the option of 'exact match' or 'loose match' on a per word option, unlike SMF/Wedge.

There's also the ability to define acronyms in the system, which are essentially a form of censored word, which can optionally reuse the <acronym> tag or just expand the term out.

Language Management also comes under Look & Feel, and is essentially much the same as what SMF/Wedge have. Lastly there's an area to configure images for the mobile app, for a bit of branding goodness.

Next up is Support. The first part of Support is a dashboard listing total members with counts based on 'online now', 'pending validation', 'locked accounts' and 'spammers' plus numbers of topics/posts including those awaiting moderation. This leads onto a quick version listing of IPB, MySQL, PHP versions plus disabled PHP functions, extensions, safe mode, memory use etc.... and somehow they have a list of the Windows processes. I have no idea how they do that - though I'll note they also have a 'system load' figure which roughly correlates with the current total % CPU in use. Again, I have no idea how they get that either but it will be interesting to find out.

There's also tools for testing for presence of things in files that shouldn't be there - leading/trailing whitespace, over-generous file permissions, ability to check outgoing connections (e.g. cURL), database checker (both tables and indexes), and facilities to test email sending.

After that, there's the SQL Toolbox, which lets you view the columns and indexes of each table, plus run direct SQL queries. There is also a per-table export option that actually looks like it might work, as well as a formal backup facility but...Funny that, it's not just SMF :lol: After that we have lists of MySQL runtime info, system vars and process list... oddly enough anyone who can really make use of that information can get it from phpMyAdmin instead... I have not needed to know any of that stuff in any support I've done for SMF yet.

After that we have the Stats & Logs section... you can pull up registrations between any two dates, grouping by days, weeks or months to see given trends. The same breakdown is also available for new topics, all posts, personal messages, topic views and spammers (from the spam service)... we already have much the same list in our stats centre, but it's interesting to be able to be more specific in terms of getting reports.

As far as logs go, of course, we have the error log, admin action log, moderator logs, email error logs, spider logs, warning logs - all fairly straightforward. On top of that we have XML-RPC API logs[6], scheduled task log, admin login logs, spam service logs, SQL error logs and the topic archiver log. Most of that is also already covered in SMF/Wedge, of course.

Lastly there is the Other Apps area. This is where all the IP stuff lives, all the configuration for IP.Blog, IP.Calendar etc., it's all in there. Each application has its own top level menu entry even with a little [IPS] prefix. I don't really want to drag this bit out much more, you probably get the idea of where this is going ;)

Phew. That's really it, I think. IPB is enormously powerful. It has a *huge* amount going on under the hood and it's designed to be able to cope with almost anything you want to throw at it... I'm having trouble imagining right now what you'd need to add, but the price is that it is complex to manage and sluggish to boot. Yup, it is not going to go quickly; but there's a *lot* of caching going on so the query count isn't particularly high. It's roughly comparable to ours when not all tricked out with plugin goodness, for what good that is as a metric.[7]

If you want a forum that's pretty battle hardened and capable, slick even but not going to rock anyone's world, IPB is it. It does its job and does it well. But it's not going to move you on an emotional level. You're not going to hate using it, either as a user or an admin, but you're probably not going to gaze lovingly at any of it either. It's competent on all counts but that's really it. And it's not the cheapest - especially since most plugins are paid too. You will want deep pockets to run an IPB forum. But you do get what you pay for, IMHO.

And that concludes this System Visitation for now. Shout if you have any questions or concerns and I'll see what I can do to answer them. Also if there's any screenshots you'd like or anything, do ask.

1.	I'll sum it up by saying that it is much the same as what you see elsewhere stylistically, where you get a summary, profile comments/status updates, seeing liked posts/blogs/calendar items/gallery items, friends, topics/posts/blog posts/files/media items by the person, and editing profile is separate thing from just viewing it, but again nothing unexpected.
2.	Yes, I don't like it either, because odds are it's less secure!
3.	Which is shown at the top of the thread, before all the posts are shown normally
4.	I have never quite understood the logic of that.
5.	This is a twist on topic privacy, other systems including vBulletin 3 and XF do it. The idea is that you can create a board where normal people can post and see their own topics, while moderators can see all posts, like a support board. As yet, I don't think we can do this in Wedge. @Nao, what do you reckon about adding 'staff' to the list of options for topic privacy, where staff is anyone who can see the board, and has moderate board (in that board) or moderate forum permission...?
6.	IPB has an XML-RPC API that means you can create API keys and allow certain actions, e.g. for third party tools. There is a defined list of APIs available, this log lets you see which API user did what and when. I never mentioned it before because I'm still not sure it has much of a use as such.
7.	14 good queries versus 7 poor ones and the 14 will probably run faster.